The article (below) is prefaced in the newspaper as follows: “Dr. Edward
Wallace Lee, of New York, one of the physicians who attended the late President
during his fatal illness in Buffalo, has been making investigations in the
various penal institutions of the country with a view to discovering the
physiological and pathological origin of crime. The present controversy
among the criminologists and alienists with regard to the moral responsibility
of Czolgosz, the late President’s assassin, leads the Doctor to offer some
advanced views on the physical phase of crime, and he argues that the criminal
tendency often has a purely physical reason behind it, which, being eliminated
by careful treatment, may restore the offender to absolute moral responsibility.”

“By Dr. Edward Wallace Lee” (p. 12).

Document

Bodily Ailments Responsible for Crime

SIX hundred thousand dollars are spent every year in this country
in caring for the criminal classes whom stern justice has landed
safely behind bars. Untold millions are spent by society in general
for self-protection against such as are now at large, and to prevent
as far as possible the making of more criminals.
Science is just beginning to regard
the criminal from a pathological standpoint first and a criminal
standpoint afterward. Behind every criminal act we are discovering
a physiological law. In other words, the greater share of crime
is proven to be committed by men in some wise deficient, in some
particular sick, in some degree irresponsible.
And yet I believe that there are moments
in the history of the most responsible and normal lives when the
individual is absolutely irresponsible. Sudden and temporary aberration,
resulting directly from some physical stress that produces abnormal
pressure upon the brain, accounts for many extraordinary phenomena.
Subconscious acts, even by the most temperate and well balanced
minds, are not at all improbable. Automatic cerebration, independent
from the conscious will; auto-intoxication through excessive joy,
grief or other cerebral excitement, are common to society through
all classes. These moments of semi-insanity are subjects for the
pathologists first and the criminologists afterward.
The case of Czolgosz, the late President’s
assassin, offered a subject of controversy among criminologists
and alienists. So far as may be judged, after most careful examination,
the murderer was found to be in a state of comparative physical
and mental soundness—this, of course, some weeks after committing
his rash act. It does not appear that the assassin was the victim
of a sudden and unexplainable hallucination, but was the creature
of physical suggestion.
The fact that physical indications
gave evidence of normality some weeks after the crime was committed
does not, unfortunately, explain the condition of mind the assassin
must have been in at the time of firing the fatal shot and during
the previous days, when he was scouting about the Exposition grounds
for an opportunity to accomplish his purpose, nor does a mere autopsy
account for the continued irritation of the brain cells, which kept
alive during all this period of suspense the insane enthusiasm and
the lust for bloodshed.
Shall we not some day come into a
closer knowledge of just such baffling phenomena as the criminal
attitude of Czolgosz toward society and the cowardly deed that was
the outcome of this abnormality of mind, and while in no wise extenuating,
yet offer to the thinking world somewhat of a reasonable solution
for such phenomena, a thing that science has hitherto failed to
do?
Instances are not wanting to the proof
that man is capable of lapsing into an epileptic psychical state,
wherein he is perfectly irresponsible. These are questions of psychology
which begin where physiology ends in the search for the absolute,
but it proves the original premises, namely, that too little attention
is paid to the bodily condition of criminals in our various State
institutions, the physical shortcomings that are responsible in
a large measure for the mental aberration that occasioned the lapse
into moral turpitude.
A few years ago a young lady of refinement
and wealth committed murder in one of these states of psychical
irresponsibility directly caused by bodily ill. She was sentenced
to a few hours of imprisonment and taken by kindly hands into a
retreat, where, after years of expert nursing, she was restored
to normal physical and mental well being. Had she been the daughter
of poor and unlettered parents, without influence and money, she
would still be behind the bars, with no attention paid to her ailments,
mental or physical. Instances of murder, theft, arson and other
crimes committed under temporary stress due to physical ills are
known among the wealthy and influential as with the lowly, but unfortunately
society feels that in incarcerating an offender its whole duty is
done.
Will not the time soon come when the
poor inmate of our penal institutions shall receive the same scientific
care that only the wealthy offender now enjoys, and will not society
itself be benefited in the effect that such care may have upon the
whole criminal body by sending forth a well man at the expiration
of his sentence—well, both mentally and physically—and thereby lessen
that man’s chances of ever returning to prison?
As the insane asylum is being regarded
more and more in the light of a psychopathic hospital rather than
a jail, so, in an enlightened era, will our prisons be regarded
less in the light of a jail and more as a hospital where society
will be less interested in the problem of vengeance against its
offenders and more in the science of restoring the abnormal mind
to the absolutely normal state. This, as I maintained previously,
is as incapable of crime as a perfectly normal heart is capable
of beating faster or slower than the natural physiological law allows,
or the normal ear of hearing sounds that do not exist, or of the
normal eye seeing images that have no being.